


The Sound Beneath Us

by Kartaylir



Category: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Gen, Legends, Story within a Story, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27019330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kartaylir/pseuds/Kartaylir
Summary: The noises Zelda has heard coming from the well concern her, but Impa has tales of things lost even deeper beneath the earth.
Relationships: Impa & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	The Sound Beneath Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disgruntled_owl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/gifts).



The room was dark. No light seeped through the boards over the windows, the indistinct surface of the roof and walls. Even the door frame was tight enough to keep out even the slightest disruption to the darkness. Everything in order for an old lesson. For one that ensured Impa couldn’t see every moment of uncertainty and worry in Zelda’s face. The inexactness to her breathing, yes, but not how she squared her shoulders, pressed her lips together whenever she was reminded of the slow build to all of this. Every instance of something slightly wrong that folded together into a pattern that spoke of the loss of home and all save the thinnest slices of hope.

But a sliver of hope there was, and Zelda needed to be trained to tend to it. The darkness was only a start to such matters, and not the first beginning to them. 

Impa lit a candle. It flickered, sent shadows and light in turn over Zelda’s face. Enough light that Zelda’s gaze could be tracked as she looked over the callouses upon Impa’s hands. Those reminders of a harsher life outside of palaces.

Zelda remained silent as Impa set the candle down between them. Its light spread over folded legs and crossed arms as well now, across the simple clothing they’d adopted to remain beneath notice.

In all the room the only piece of finery was the tray beneath the candle. It was carved of polished stone, black and violet with only a hint of crimson left to form the rough sketch of an eye. That shape that would be slowly refilled as the red wax melted down.

“Hold your hand over it,” Impa said. “And tell me which of the shadows are true.”

Zelda did not hesitate on the first of those. Lowered her hand enough for warmth, but not enough to burn. Wiggled her fingers. Watched the patches of darkness shift around her. In that, at least, she had absorbed her lessons. The shadows still masked her face, but Impa could see the furrow of a brow as the princess-as the child-discarded each easy answer in its turn.

Impa, of course, remained perfectly still. Silent. Waiting.

“All, and none,” Zelda said, after a time. “Like thunder after lightning. The blade of grass bending back to its place after the hooves have passed.” It was not the words she’d been told before, but a similar shape of them. As if new water had flowed into the spaces vacated by the old.

“Ours is the art of moments and edges, of finding all the lines between and the spaces from which we can slip matters to one side or another.” Impa might as well have been speaking of the weather. Or the weather some years past, for such had changed now as well in this damaged world.

“It’s more than that.” Zelda extinguished the flame with her gloved hand. 

“Only an echo of what might have been.”

“You want me to see the weapons in such things also.”

A nod. Silence followed for some moments more.

Finally, Impa shifted, the sound as clear an indicator as a cough in the darkness. “Did you see the well, the graveyard?” Impa’s voice was calm, precisely flat. The questions weighted with care.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear them?”

“Wind through the stones until it sounded like moans. And beneath all of that, I almost thought I heard the muffled ringing of bells below deepest earth.” Zelda hesitated. “Perhaps even drums.”

“You’re not the first to have heard such things. Nor will you be the last, so long as the village endures.”

“There’s a tale for it, isn’t there? Tell me,” Zelda said, with a hint of the child always wanting to hear another story.

Impa reached out to pull the candle back toward her in the darkness. “A goldsmith once lived in the village. Or perhaps a sculptor, for not all his wares were small. Some say that he made the settings for the spiritual stones to house their power, so famed were his talents.”

There was a movement of air, the sound of Zelda’s hair shifting against her clothing as the princess nodded. “And he made the bells?”

“A king asked him to mold them for a funerary boat, for such was the custom then to honor those who’d died in battle. And in memory of his wife, the artist agreed. For she had been lost in such a fashion.”

Zelda exhaled a halting breath. The smoke of the extinguished candle followed it through the room.

Impa tapped her fingers on the candle’s tray, then relit it. The flame was weaker, its light diminished by how it’d sunk into the width of the candle. “So pleased was the king with these bells that he tasked the artist with the figurehead of the ship as well. It was to be twice the height of a Goron and drawn from the legends of the golden goddesses. For the king grew old and wished that his body might be borne upon it, more gloriously than any other.”

“And the artist?”

“He had never formed something so large, so distant from the arts of jewelry and gems. Five times he formed a body from it, and five times he melted it back down, not seeing the light of the great goddesses or the memory of his beloved in its eyes. And so the king grew impatient. He demanded the figurehead be finished, without care for the wishes of the artist. For his fears of dishonoring the goddesses through this act.”

The shift of weight, of muscles and cloth as Zelda leaned forward. “No king is so great as to lay claim to them.” Her words were sharp.

“He thought otherwise. And so he had the artist watched, lest he melt his work down again. And under that careful eye, the figurehead was finally done. Soldiers carried it to the boat, and attached it to the hull with too little care.”

“Too little care for the weight of gold.”

“On the very night the king died it felt loose into the river. Some say it was that fallen figurehead that killed him. But it fell deep enough as to be gone, though some say it shimmered and melted away on that night. He was sent away with only the bells.”

“And the artist?”

“He threw himself in the river after his work. Or took a new name and travelled the lands of Hyrule to study the arts of jewelry from all the tribes. Or, perhaps, he remained in the village and changed his face to one unknown, so as to pass his arts freely to his children.”

“When the memory of the goddesses is disturbed, again you will hear the folly ringing.” Zelda spoke with the echo of something long repeated, a song, a poem, another way to catch a thing into the corners of a mind.

“Perhaps.”

“So is it the wind I heard, or moans?”

“It depends on how fearful the one before the well is,” Impa said. And then in her turn she extinguished the candle.


End file.
